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Uh … AI bubble costing the US as much money in 12 months as *two major wars over 13 years* is quite the buried lede!
"If it can't go on forever it will stop." — economist Herb Stein, 1985. (The "it" is a placeholder for any economic process.)
https://researchbuzz.masto.host/@researchbuzz/115782207999466966
Charlie, have you seen this video?
I've sent this to a lot of people, this is the sort of thing that is going to make communities and states go bankrupt when the LLM Bubble bursts...
Private equity bros will walk away with millions and everyone else will be stuck with white elephant complexes that no one wants
@cstross According to this analyst the AI bubble is “17 times bigger than the dot-com bubble and four times bigger than the 2008 real-estate bubble.”
https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/18/business/ai-bubble-analyst-nightcap
According to another article I read the US would be in a recession right now if it wasn’t for AI investment, which is essentially privately-funded stimulus spending at a massive level.
@cstross I am increasingly convinced the AI bubble exists solely to sell the idea of being able to do everything as a means of concentrating money.
The point is to participate in a mammonite magic to have all the of the love of god (that is, all the money) and the thinking involved is as completely detached from any material concern as a stylite.
(The "and everything will be easy!" part is something of a tell, here; that's the language of attaining paradise, not material ambition.)
@graydon @cstross The thing I don't get is the appeal of "and everything will be easy".
The most rewarding things in my life are all hard and take time and effort. Literature is full of protagonists learning that easy things lack the impact and value of difficult things.
Hard things: playing an instrument (or cooking or baking or quilting or any artistic or artisanal or crafting or creating activity) well enough to bring joy to yourself and others; experiencing a gestalt solution while problem solving; relationships
Easy things: ordering pizza; watching a concert on tv; looking up the answer to a puzzle
Agree that the problem isn't that everything needs to be easy, it's that many people are forced into pointless drudgery in order to get food and shelter (so the context of "hard" is "exhausting" instead of "challenging"), and the cultural focus is on consumption and financial shenanigans instead of creation (so the context of "easy" is "I can rest" not "simple").
@cstross All the other stuff—the general obnubilation of factual knowledge, the extirpation of labour, the unbounded consumption—is just the general nature of paradise to the CEO class, existence free of obligation.
@graydon @cstross The AI in the search engine defines "obnubilation" in French and translates it to English as "obsession"; further down the page, Merriam Webster defines it as "mental cloudiness and torpidity" and Collins defines it as "the process or fact of making dimmer, darker, or obscure".
The AI is obnubilating my understanding of "obnubilation".
@cstross unsustainable thing don't sustain. It's right there in the word.
This AI nonsense coinciding with the ramp up in climate change impacts is going to be fast, at least by historical standards. Humans these days have a hard time thinking in longer timespans than a few weeks, but we're setting up the destiny and destruction of the next generations.
And how they will hate us.
@cstross I worry how much their collapse will drag down the rest of the world.
At a time when there are larger clearer tasks for all hands than ever before.
@Photo55 Planetary GNP is on the order of $80-100Tn/year. So this means up to 1.5% of the global economic product will evaporate if the bubble bursts right now. But there's a lot more 2nd-order activity hanging on it, eg. construction, manufacturing. I expect the AI bubble to trigger a full-scale global depression when it pops, not just a US one. 1929 all over again. Or even 1873/1893.
@cstross @Photo55 I've done the math on it. It's actually significantly more than that. Including supply chain impact, it's anywhere from 5-15% of global GDP with a much, much higher percentage in the US.
But that's the small fry shit. Remember 2008? Took less than 10 years to repeat and crank it up orders of magnitude higher with bad loans and new forms of CDOs.
The entire foundation is completely fucked.
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